US criticism of Chinese anti-terror law: is it justified?

Despite the NSA’s wide involvement in mass data collection, the US government is unhappy about Beijing’s efforts to protect China’s information security with a new counter-terrorism law, Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University, told RT.

Beijing’s proposed
anti-terrorism law would regulate US tech firms operating in the
country. It would oblige them to share encryption keys and pass
codes with Chinese surveillance authorities. President Obama has
criticized it warning that the legislation could hurt the Chinese
economy.

RT:Snowden's revelations about the NSA show
that the US is also widely involved in mass data collection,
demanding backdoors from domestic tech firms. So why is President
Obama demanding China stops doing it?

Matthew Green: It’s a bit of a challenging
position to take. There have been a lot of arguments lately by US
law enforcement that there should be backdoors in US encryption
systems. Now China is basically playing off that and asking for
the same thing. Of course the US government is very unhappy about
that. It is difficult to say why those arguments shouldn’t be
just as valid, I’m a little bit confused myself.

RT:These new rules are part of an
anti-terror law aimed to protect the nation's information
security. Do you think that China has valid reasons for the
move?

MG: China has a fairly long history of using its
technology systems to essentially listening in on people’s
communications and monitor what people are saying online. This
would be the next step when you’re monitoring both non-encrypted
communications and the encrypted communications that people are
increasingly sending. So it would be consistent for China to do
that. It is a bit of a break with US policy to ask for that.

RT:China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has
already responded that it's not going to review the law. What
could be the possible consequences if the standoff between the
two countries is not resolved?

MG: You end up in a situation where a lot of US
products that companies in the US want to sell to China. They
might have to change those products in specific ways to
accommodate the Chinese requests. It’s not clear that those
companies would want to do that, or the US government would be
very happy if those changes were made. So that is why there are a
lot of concerns about the economic impact of this kind of
request.

RT:Some critics in Washington also say
these regulations are aimed to support Chinese homegrown
businesses in response to the popularity of Western brands in the
country. What's your view on this?

MG: It’s definitely one interpretation. It
certainly would be much more difficult to sell a product that
doesn’t have a Chinese-approved backdoor essentially built into
it. It would be much harder to sell that if you were US company
and didn’t have that feature. The question then - is it going to
be easy for the US firms or European firms to add these features
to Chinese products or is it going to be so prohibitive that they
don’t sell products in China anymore.

RT:What do you think is the upshot for the
consumers in this? They are going to be walking around, perhaps
the US and China, with products that are easily crackable,
hackable. What’s their takeaway for the average person?

MG: I think that the deployment of very strong
encryption has been generally really good for us. This has
protected us against a lot of very sophisticated types of
hacking. These kinds of hacks are not going away. Encryption is
one of the few things we can do to make ourselves safer. In
theory it might be possible to build products with backdoors that
can’t be hacked. But unfortunately we’re very bad at doing that.
The more backdoors you put in something, the more likely it is to
be broken by somebody who you don’t want to get into it.

RT:Do you think it’s a good thing that
governments have this kind of encryption keys to get at this data
if that is necessary? Is there a possibility that they can do it
for the right thing?

MG: I don’t dispute that there are valid reason
that you want to be able to surveil individuals, we have wiretap
laws for good reasons. There is a lot crime that goes on. At the
same time I think the government increasingly has a lot of access
to our computer systems already. If you look at the Snowden
documents you see that the NSA, for example, has a terrific
ability to hack into computers. As far as I can see the trend has
been for governments to have more access even before we get to
adding deliberate backdoors to give them access.

MORE:

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.